Friday, October 19, 2012

Chinese Regime’s Honors for Sihanouk Annoy Netizens

A convoy taking the body of Norodom Sihanouk
to Beijing's airport en route back to his homeland, on Oct. 17, 2012.
(Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Many Chinese netizens were outraged at the Communist Party’s display
of honors for the deceased Cambodian ruler Norodom Sihanouk, who died
on Oct. 16 in Beijing.

All the flags at the Xinhua Gate and all the flags in Tiananmen
Square in Beijing were flying at half-mast, honoring the death of the
former King of Cambodia, a long-time resident of China.

People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, eulogized
him. The regime mouthpiece Xinhua reported the following day that China
and Cambodia had agreed to continue and advance their national
friendship and strategic cooperation.

Chinese News Service noted an unprecedented honor guard escorted the
casket with Sihanouk’s remains as it was carried to the airplane that
would return his body to Cambodia.

Yet Chinese netizens were unimpressed by the state honors, and
reacted with quick criticism of the regime’s tributes to the former
ruler of Cambodia.

“After the death of Norodom Sihanouk, who collaborated with the
Khmer Rouge to kill 300,000 Chinese in Cambodia, you predictably
lowered the flags to half-mast, claiming his death was a great loss to
the Chinese people,” netizen First Micro-Magazine commented to his
20,000 followers on Sina Weibo.

Citing the deaths of over 800 Chinese citizens in several tragic
incidents during the past year, Wang Qiang, a Beijing financial
professional, commented to his 43,000 followers that the regime “Didn’t
lower the flags. Now, for an old Cambodian man who had been a free
loader for several decades as a dependent of our tax payers, you
lowered the flags at half-staff in no time.”

Another blogger remarked that a budget item was lost, and another
asked if it wasn’t enough that he was fed for decades, calling him an
old hooligan who cheated for free food and drink.

A middle-aged Norodom Sihanouk pictured with
a bevy of young women. After his death, Chinese netizens complained of
the Cambodian monarch's corruption. (Weibo.com)

The Chinese regime treated Sihanouk, living in exile in Beijing
after being deposed in 1970, to a lavish lifestyle. Sihanouk arrived
during the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese citizens were living in
poverty and often without adequate food, making the memory of his
excesses even more bitter to netizens.

With his several wives and concubines, Sihanouk enjoyed such
delicacies as a special soup one bowl of which required the death of
208 chickens, reported Caijing, a Chinese financial newspaper.

Xiao Jiansheng, editor of the state-run Hunan Daily newspaper, was
quoted by Radio Free Asia, as saying, “Back in the 1970s, after the
coup in Cambodia … Premier Zhou and Chairman Mao took pretty good care
of him.”

However, one netizen framed the regime’s display of homage to the
dead king in a global perspective, in which the good graces of Cambodia
are of serious consequence.

“In the battle for Southeast Asia, Laos and Cambodia are more and
more important to China, which is the core of the issue. China must
therefore prove its good intentions. Sihanouk’s death is just a turning
point,” pointed out Yin Hongwei, an expert on South-East Asia, in his
Weibo blog.

With an eye to Cambodia’s offshore oil and gas reserves and the
historical and cultural Cambodian Khmer claim to Cochin China, which
includes the tip of the Indochinese peninsula holding the Mekong River
delta, now within Vietnam’s borders, the Chinese regime has always been
more than kind to Sihanouk.

“China should have more friends like Sihanouk,” said the Global
Times, a state run mouthpiece. One netizen wryly commented, “He is such
an old and good friend of the Chinese regime.”